How We Grew Revenue To $21K/Month Through Ads, Affiliates, And T-Shirt Sales
This is a follow up story for Warrior Lodge Media. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 4 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hi, my name is Wes O’Donnell and I am the founder of Warrior Lodge Media, an all-in-one informational website for military and veterans, a military stock photo and video production studio, and an eCommerce store.
I started Warrior Lodge as an informational website, supported by Google Adsense, in 2013. I wanted to create a single place where anyone could get free military information for people thinking about joining, active-duty service members, and veterans.
Today, the vast majority (95%) of our traffic is organic from Google search and the site currently earns between $18,000-$22,000 per month from a combination of Adsense ads, t-shirt sales, and Amazon affiliate links. We have also started selling our military stock footage to production companies that need authentic military videos and photos.
We’ve had some recent success with short-film production by focusing on topics that are important to the military and veteran community.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
Revenue for Warrior Lodge has remained relatively the same and typically fluctuates between $15,000 per month and $25,000 per month depending entirely on the tradewinds of what’s trending on Google in any given week.
Interestingly, the entire internet, from Quora to Reddit to Google, is focusing on answering users’ questions. Google recently tweaked its ubiquitous search algorithm to prioritize information on your website that can answer a searcher’s query. At Warrior Lodge, we are very fortunate to have thousands of pages of static resource information pages for visitors. I hate chasing the almighty algorithm, but in our case, we were already set up for success because of the time investment we made years ago making this encyclopedic information available. Google used to love fresh, original content posted regularly; I would argue that they still do. But this recent Google shift to highlight content that answers visitors’ questions should inform how you create content for your company’s site.
As for other growth we have experienced, our humorous t-shirt designs have been taking off resulting in a greater share of our overall revenue. We design our shirts and use Printful for fulfillment. It’s a phenomenal system: Upload our design and sync Printful with Shopify. When a customer orders a shirt, the order automatically gets routed to Printful who prints and then ships the shirt directly to our customer with our branding. We offer free shipping, so that cuts into our margin a little. A $20 shirt nets us about $6 in profit after we pay for shipping. Averaging about 100 shirt sales a day nets us approximately $600 per day, all with no overhead or inventory. Printful integration is as automated as it gets!
For selling physical products, a couple of marketing channels have helped us tremendously: Facebook is still the gold standard, at least for us, however, we’ve been experimenting with running both an Etsy and TikTok shop in conjunction with Facebook.
For some reason, I’ve been resistant to email newsletters. We have thousands of subscribers, I have just never pulled the trigger on Mailchimp or Constant Contact. We’re likely leaving money on the table by ignoring email marketing. Perhaps that’s something we’ll tackle soon.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
In the Fall of 2020, I started law school at Western Michigan University’s Cooley School of Law. I’m easily double the age of most of my fellow students. But I discovered a reserve of cash leftover from my Post 9/11 GI Bill and if I don’t use it by 2023, then I lose it forever. Since I can’t stand the idea of giving up money that I earned across ten years in the military, I took the LSAT and applied to the closest law school to my physical location. I can’t say definitively that I’m going to be an attorney after I’m done, but a J.D. never hurt anyone’s resume.
My biggest challenge is that time is simultaneously my most valuable asset and my least abundant asset. I’m haunted by the missed opportunity of not investing more time into cultivating Warrior Lodge into something bigger over the past 8 years. Between my work with American Military University, writing, speaking, law school, consulting, teaching as an adjunct professor of marketing, and keeping an eye on several other passive income streams (directory sites), I just don’t have the bandwidth to grow the brand personally. I became comfortable with the passive income of Warrior Lodge and I haven’t had much incentive to put any more precious time into it. I may need to start hiring soon.
Having said that, I have big plans for the Warrior Lodge brand over the next year.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
We haven’t announced this yet, so I’m excited to reveal it here first on Starter Story: Warrior Lodge is on the verge of opening up a travel-focused brand tentatively called ‘Tours of Duty’ that will curate, review and facilitate travel to battlefields, military museums and historic sites across the United States.
I’ve always wanted to build a travel-affiliate revenue stream and this niche is a great opportunity to partner with Expedia, Priceline, and TravelPayouts, whom we’ve already contacted, to make military-themed travel fun, affordable and accessible.
Tours of Duty will launch with a dedicated military-themed travel booking site and companion YouTube Channel with popular military personalities traveling around and reviewing locations; all under the Warrior Lodge umbrella.
Looking further out into the future, I would love to add niche book publishing to our services. I know what you’re thinking: print is dead. But I honestly feel that there will come a time when books (and magazines) will come back in style due mainly to people’s exhaustion with screen fatigue. Besides, there’s just something magical about holding a physical book. And if we focus on military history and memoirs exclusively, publishing would fit nicely with our overall military brand.
If I were asked to construct my vision statement, it would be:
5 years from now we expect to have a strong brand presence in the military and veteran community through Warrior Lodge Media (Photos and video), WarriorLodge.com (Information), Tours of Duty (Mil-Travel), and Warrior Lodge Press (Mil-Publishing).
Have you read any good books in the last year?
Aside from law school casebooks?
I’ve always been fascinated by “luck” and its role in business success. I recently picked up Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business by Thor Muller.
Also, it’s not exclusively business-focused but Top 100 Questions Friends & Family Ask a Lawyer by Nelson P. Miller should be read by everybody. It’s all the best stuff from law school without having to suffer through any of the Socratic methods.
As for podcasts, I may be biased but a good friend and retired USMC officer Dr. Larry Parker hosts a success-focused podcast called The Veteran Edge. Larry is a self-made success story with tremendous knowledge and expertise.
And finally, I wouldn’t be a very good entrepreneur if I didn’t plug my book Own the Crowd about how you can become an amazing public speaker and get a standing ovation every time you speak. Whether you’re giving a TED talk or a speech at your friend’s wedding, it’s time to be memorable.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
This is what you came here for. Warrior Lodge’s story is great but how can you duplicate its success?
Warrior Lodge is successfully generating passive income because of three primary concepts: Authenticity, niche down, and automation.
Authenticity - There is so much marketing noise that consumers have become deaf and blind to most online ideas. Everything just becomes the same. It’s like you’re walking through a thick fog every time you go online. But occasionally, the fog clears and you’ll encounter something completely authentic and it captivates us.
I promise you that your brand story is interesting. Why? Because it’s unique to you. You don’t need to be a carbon copy of anything. Just tell a compelling personal story about your brand and people will instantly recognize and appreciate its value.
Niche Down - Understand that you will not be everything to everybody. Jeff Bezos already does that and he has a huge head start. How to make money on the internet, in the era of Amazon, could be its own course/video/lecture/book, but here are the Cliffs Notes: You need to pick a niche that’s small, but not so small that you won’t have a rechargeable customer base and enough recurring revenue, and become the single best place on the internet for that niche.
For instance, I recently started a directory site called “Best Michigan” that allows Michigan businesses to create a free business listing (think Yelp) and paid listings for more options. After a year, I had a handful of free listings but no pay. Best Michigan was far too broad. So I revamped the site to focus on Michigan restaurants exclusively, and the site blew up. Now, Best Michigan is earning about $1000 per month of recurring revenue from restaurants around Michigan that have paid for a deluxe listing. Niche = Michigan Restaurants
Excited from Best Michigan’s success, and leveraging my growing lawyer network from law school, I just started a directory site called “Lawyerly.” Using the same directory theme as Best Michigan, I created a niche directory site just for Michigan lawyers. It’s already bringing in revenue. Let’s face it - lawyers are their brand and are willing to pay to have their face out there. Niche = Michigan Lawyers
Whether it’s directories or eCommerce, the lesson here is to niche down into something that people can’t get somewhere else. As for Amazon, they have their problems. First, they have a flood of counterfeit products and fake reviews. Until they get on top of their problem, you can be establishing your product as authentic and valuable with your highly-polished eCommerce site. Second, Amazon has grown too big for its good and good old Uncle Sam is considering breaking it up into smaller companies. Don’t worry about Amazon for now.
Automation - This is the most technical but essential part of passive income. Business automation is transforming the way brands operate, allowing us to do more with less and scale. Here are my favorite automation tools, in no particular order:
Upwork - Hire freelancers to write original content for cheap
Zapier - Essential for email and file management
Hootsuite - Posting to numerous social media platforms, because I hate to
Grammarly - What can I say? Good grammar saves lives...
Calendly - Automated appointment scheduling
Xero - Financial bookkeeping, super easy
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Unfortunately, I am not currently hiring but maybe in the near-ish future. When I start, I’ll be sure to post on the Starter Story jobs page.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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